Or to be more precise: Happy 5th anniversary of being accidentally announced a day early.

The first time I heard of it was on this Slashdot article: http://tech.slashdot...-google-browser - which linked to a blog called Google Blogoscoped. As it turned out the owner of the blog, Philipp Lenssen, received his copy of the comic Google had asked Scott McCloud to draw about the new browser one day early. Like any good blogger would have done he immediately scanned in the comic and posted a blog entry. Google themselves held an announcement keynote the next day, followed by a release of the first Windows beta of Chrome at noon Pacific time.

I remember installing a Windows XP VM to be able to test the first beta out (I only had a Mac at the time). Chrome 0.2.149 was a very minimal, if not too minimal browser - there were no extensions yet, no way to manage your bookmarks, or a way to import your existing bookmarks for that matter. Even in this early stage however Chrome looked fairly promising to me.

Thanks to the rapid release cycle it didn't take long for Chrome to gain new features and come to OS X and Linux as well. I've been using it as my primary browser for well over two years now. The various browser statistics sites show I'm not alone; Chrome has long clinched the #2 market share spot from Mozilla Firefox.

Today I am using Chrome on my work and private laptop, my smartphone and my tablet. And while I keep trying out other browsers I always end up coming back to it.

I remember using the first beta of Chrome, it was terrible (still is lolo)

I hope Google stick to their promise of not including every random non-standard idea they come up with into Chrome, but considering one of the first things they wanted to include was Pepper/Native Client I kinda doubt it.

Edit: To this day it still has stupid WebKit bugs dating back to Panther, or non-standard stuff like -webkit-device-pixel-ratio.

Blink engine idea is now IMO better than previously blindly following Webkit, it now does support many unprefixed standards, many stupid standards depreciated to move on and also improving standard support align with IE10+ and Firefox. Overall happy situation for developers with it.

I used Google Chrome early versions on my pathetic poor hardware based PC, and it was even in Beta form faster than Firefox but Firefox was not too shabbyand Chrome fought amazing battle and climbed to second spot, but still I am still FF guy but eager to switch to something better.